The Innocents Read online

  Which seemed perfectly acceptable to Antoinette, who after a second tentative nibble appeared to recognize something tougher than green-stuff, yet not inimical, and philosophically squatted down on my shoes.

  “She’s so shy, if there’s a stranger she simply won’t utter,” explained Cecilia. “But you’re certainly favoured!”

  —I shall never forget how lovely she looked at that moment, bending forward from where she sat, her eyes on her little daughter, one hand stretched out, as if in an arrested caress, toward the smooth, lint-coloured head. In the six years since she left us Cecilia had grown even slenderer, but without the least angularity. There was a wonderful grace about her even more attractive than her beauties of hair and skin and feature—though these too seemed to me enhanced, as if by special cherishing. I could easily imagine her becoming a leader of fashion and a pride to her husband in New York! But even while Antoinette was still trying to undo my shoelaces (she didn’t succeed), Cecilia’s expression of maternal affection altered to an equally maternal expression of irritation—though directed rather towards her husband.

  “When we left, she was quite rosy!” harked back Cecilia. “Now she’s white as an egg! Didn’t I tell you, darling, we should have left her with Miss Swanson?—Swedish,” she added, in a hasty parenthesis to myself, “with absolutely every qualification!”

  “Maybe I was wrong,” said Rab quietly.

  “You certainly were!” snapped Cecilia. “And there’s still Paris and Rome and Salzburg ahead!”

  It is always embarrassing to witness a tiff between husband and wife; I so to speak absented myself by lifting Antoinette up and letting her bite my thumb more conveniently from my lap. I only hoped Cecilia might not feel jealous, at such trust in as she said a stranger; but not at all. On the contrary—

  “Actually I’ve suddenly had the most brilliant idea!” declared Cecilia, turning from her husband to myself with a lightened brow. “If we could only leave Tony with you, just for the month, and pick her up on the way home, I’m sure it would be far, far better for her!”

  Extraordinarily enough I paused only a moment before agreeing: to look enquiringly at Rab. He for his part gave me as searching a look back; then with equal consideration contemplated my sitting-room, and the windows open to the garden, and the garden beyond. I suppose it all presented a picture of modest comfort and respectability, also of course he’d met me before.

  “It might be a good idea at that,” said he.

  So it was arranged, after singularly little more discussion (I having lost my heart to Antoinette already), that while the Guthries toured Europe their daughter should be left in my care, and her parents brought her to deposit with me next morning, together with her clothes in a suitcase and a traveling-bag of toys.

  The interim parting was remarkably painless.—I had taken the precaution of borrowing a basketful of tabby kittens with which to distract and console an infant in tears: Antoinette was obviously taken by them, she purred back like a kitten herself, but had not been crying. Cecilia quite rightly behaved as casually as possible; she and I equally, I think, reprobated Rab’s too prolonged, too serious embracement of his small daughter before he finally released her and followed Cecilia out to the car.

  Antoinette appeared to forget them instantaneously. Of course she had the kits to divert her, and then a glass of milk and bread-and-honey, before being tucked up for a nap in the cot I’d borrowed from the Women’s Institute and had set up beside my bed. She seemed so cozy and content (and tired out, poor infant), I in fact gave her her boiled egg for supper there too; but still through the night lay with one ear alert in case she woke crying and needing comfort.

  It was I who didn’t sleep; not Antoinette.

  When in the morning I got her up, and told her who Mrs. Brewer was, and showed her where the garden she could play in was, Antoinette accepted all in the same peaceable silence. I knew she wasn’t mute—though now I came to consider it, I’d never heard her speak a word—because of her murmurings to the cats; but during those very first days of our life together it became clear to me that Cecilia’s daughter was what in earlier times would have been called an innocent.

  2

  1

  I have spoken of her, describing our first encounter, as a baby. Antoinette was in fact three. At three, she should have been able to untie my shoelaces quite easily. She should have not only uttered, but prattled. At three, Antoinette had still no more vocabulary than—a baby.

  She was also as physically clumsy as a baby. If I had visualized her carrying bowl of eggs, basket of oranges, with serious, safe care, I soon discovered my error. Anything Antoinette was given to carry she dropped. It was as though her powers of concentration had an unusually limited span. She spilled even a cup of milk before she drank from it, and a spoonful of porridge before it reached her mouth—which of course made for a certain messiness that I had to discipline myself to accept without snapping, since one of the first things I learned about Antoinette was that she needed to be spoken to always very quietly, not to frighten her. It was specially important not to frighten her, not only for her own sake but because when frightened she was sick. I do not mean ailed: threw up. So I kept a supply of paper napkins always handy.

  Other things that frightened her were strangers, blancmange, and dark glasses (especially if put on and off) but nothing so much as a voice raised in anger. I myself share the same distaste, though not of course to the extent of hiding under my bed; but on the rare occasions when Mrs. Brewer and her daughter-in-law “had words” in the kitchen, it was refuged under her cot that I discovered the suddenly missing Antoinette. Fortunately such incidents were rare, not only in my own quiet household but in the village generally, of which the motto, in the unlikely event of its ever attaining a coat of arms, might well be De gustibus non est disputandum—Anglicé, I don’t blame you. Thus when two couples openly exchanged spouses without benefit of the Divorce Court, no one blamed them, no more than old Mrs. Bragg, supporting fifteen cats on her pension, was blamed for regularly each Sunday stealing all milk bottles left outside doors on her way home from Early Communion. Of old Mr. Pyke at Hollanders, so heavy-handed with a strap, woe betide any urchin caught scrumping in his orchard, it was remembered in excuse how he’d been thrashed as a boy, after his mother died, by a father even heavier-handed still. (What myself was to be excused for remains to be seen.) Then there was Major Cochran, ex—Royal Artillery, D.S.O. and bar, a positive menace each Armistice Day. Like every other, our village was only too willing to commemorate it, as a nice turnout for Old Comrades and the Boy Scouts and the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade; owing to trouble with his dentures the Major’s perennial recitation of They shall not grow old often held the band up marking time for as much as ten minutes; but no one blamed him …

  So certainly no one in the village blamed Antoinette for being an innocent.

  2

  Spoken to always quietly and slowly, Antoinette understood perfectly. All that was needed was patience. She liked hearing poetry, if it had a strong rhythm, as in the Lays of Ancient Rome. I also introduced her—a rather abrupt declension, I fear!—to such easy nursery rhymes as “Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been?”—still substituting for the rather awkward monosyllable “queen” an easier disyllable: “I’ve been up to London to buy a tureen.” Antoinette knew what a tureen was, because it was what I served our soup from. She also appeared to like the word for itself, for its soothing, crooning sound. (“Tureen, tureen!” I once heard her cajole a hedgehog.) Obviously she made no connection between sound and content; another word she liked was “vermin,” overheard during an argument with my gardener on the subject of mole-traps. And indeed, for sound, what word is prettier—the soft opening v that begins also violets, and velvet, and voluptuousness, then the tender dying fall that concludes? “Vermin” became in fact Antoinette’s term of affection, applied alike to a cat, a dead toad, or myself.

  I cannot describe what an affectionate li
ttle creature she was. If I say “creature” as I might say “animal,” I too was accepting her innocence. Though childless, indeed unmarried, I have had ample opportunity (as in a village who has not?) to observe children from infancy onwards, and as a consequence believe firmly in the doctrine of original sin. The merest babe is covetous; a toddler no sooner finds its feet than employs them to trample its neighbour’s mud-pie landmark; even the more sophisticated vices, such as exclusiveness, or cold-shouldering, bud early. (The exchange, “Can I play with you?” “No, you can’t!” already adumbrating a Golf Club Committee faced by Jew or tradesman.) Antoinette cold-shouldered nobody—that is, who wasn’t a stranger; and nothing in nature was alien to her.

  The butcher’s boy, for example, so glaringly cross-eyed he couldn’t get a girl to go to the pictures with him, had in Antoinette almost an admirer. She seemed to find his squint an interesting variation from the usual—which when I remembered her dislike of dark glasses (also a facial variant), at first surprised me. But Kevin’s squint came by nature; or possibly Antoinette thought he squinted deliberately, to amuse? In any case she never showed the least repulsion, unlike the girls who wouldn’t go to the pictures with him, and more than once I found myself having to turn away joints of meat I hadn’t ordered.—“If he waited for an order, we shouldn’t see him more than once a week,” pointed out Mrs. Brewer sensibly; and added that latterly he’d quite perked up.

  No more did Antoinette cold-shoulder Mrs. Bragg who stole the Sunday milk. As I have said, no one blamed Mrs. Bragg (except her victims) though I personally felt she should either have made ends meet on her pension or else kept fewer cats. But she so smelled of her cats, even a whiff of her coat in the High Street made me hurry on—unless Antoinette were with me; Antoinette snuffed up the odour—natural to cats if not to Mrs. Bragg—rather appreciatively, and even lingered, thus giving the old thief the opportunity to touch me for a shilling. It was I who had finally to cold-shoulder Mrs. Bragg, my purse being quite unequal to support fifteen cats most of which ought to have been put down.

  The village accepted Antoinette as kindly and sensibly as possible. If I took her shopping with me, she never encountered a look that wasn’t good-tempered. She was still happiest in the garden, where we came to spend more and more of our time quite content without other company. Not that she was always at my side: she appeared to have a positive need for periods of solitude—it would seem absurd to say for meditation: but often for an hour at a stretch Antoinette would squat by herself under my artichokes, where soon her regular frequentation scooped out a little nest, like a down-to-earth squirrel’s dray, between the strong protective stems …

  3

  I often wondered what kind of a life she could have led in New York. None of the beautiful toys left behind for her—and I have never seen prettier: a little lamb woolly in cashmere, a Japanese mousmé exquisite in silk, another doll dressed as a Puritan maid freshly disembarked from the Mayflower—engaged Antoinette’s attention in the least. What she preferred for playthings were much more natural objects, as soon as she learned to find them in the garden, as toads, whether alive or dead.

  I have always myself rather patronized toads—at least have never persecuted them. For the ugly beast that bears a precious jewel in its head I have great sympathy—that is, alive and hopping. Antoinette loved them dead as well, or even better, as more tolerant of being carried in a pocket. I so learned to accept this, it was only at the point of absolute decay and stench that I turned Antoinette’s pockets out and put her smock to soak in disinfectant. Of course I always scrubbed her hands before meals.

  In the parcel of toys she brought were also simple games, such as ludo and tiddlywinks, furnished with bright-coloured ivorine counters. What Antoinette offered in addition, and obviously preferred, were neat brown rabbit-droppings—actually the first signal to myself that I had rabbits in my garden at all. Of course the upper part (that I call my ambulatory) abuts on the heath; but I had never before realized—Antoinette never strayed beyond the garden’s limit—how free they made of my whole domain.

  Tiddlywinks, played with rabbit-droppings instead of ivorine counters, is naturally a slower game, in fact not the same game at all, but suited Antoinette all the better, who needed in everything to go slowly.

  Turds deposited by stray dogs, if I happened to have left the gate open, were another matter. Though I could understand her appreciation of their almost cigar-like shapeliness and firm consistency, I never entirely reconciled myself to finding them cached under her cot. No more could Mrs. Brewer, and one or other of us regularly swept them out. Antoinette never looked for them again, but appeared to forget all about them as easily as she’d forgotten her parents.

  Which obviously no normal child would have done; only Antoinette wasn’t normal. She was an innocent.

  I wondered very much, even more than I wondered about her life in New York, whether her parents knew. It seemed impossible they should not; yet nothing in their manner, during the short time we were in contact, suggested it—and parents are notoriously often the last to suspect, still less admit, any deficiency in their offspring. Either they are blinded by natural affection, or it is a species of insult to themselves which they instinctively reject. (How long, for instance, before Mrs. Parrish, Mrs. Brewer’s second cousin, was brought to admit her epileptic Bobby more than highly strung!) But then I remembered Cecilia’s reference to Miss Swanson: “absolutely qualified” surely suggested more than an ordinary nursery-nurse?—and as a corollary that the Guthries already recognized their daughter’s especial needs? In one way it was none of my business, my own, limited responsibility being to keep her safe and well and happy for a period of four weeks, which I had no doubt I could do quite easily; yet in another way (Antoinette’s whole future so involved), it obviously was; and I painfully came to the conclusion that when at the end of the month her parents returned, it would be my duty to have a very plain talk with them.

  I so flinched from the prospect, it sometimes kept me awake at night; worse, it sometimes kept Antoinette awake in her cot beside my bed. As I have said, she was extraordinarily sensitive to any sort of thunder in the air; after that first night of complete exhaustion, if I was restless, so was she. However I diverted my mind by mentally repeating Keats’ odes to a Nightingale, Autumn, and a Grecian Urn—the tricky bit in the latter after More happy love!/More happy, happy love! needing such particular concentration as to exclude all other thoughts whatever. As it turned out, I need not have distressed myself—at least not so soon.

  4

  The outbreak of war, presaged as in 1914 by splendid weather (and I should very much like to hear a meteorologist’s gloss on the point), caught the Guthries in of all places Salzburg, whence Rab, so important an industrial chemist, was I gathered practically shanghaied back to the States in his company’s private plane. Cecilia naturally went with him—and who can blame her? As she wrote afterwards in one of her amusing letters, let alone her duty to her husband, how could she possibly face hostilities in a dirndl? Thus between Antoinette and her parents stretched an ocean suddenly so perilous, Cecilia absolutely refused to contemplate any immediate reunion.

  Actually some hundreds of British children were to make the transit without disaster, (Our own policeman’s Lenny had the time of his life in Brooklyn.) But in a succession of agitated cables Cecilia begged me to keep Antoinette safe where she’d been left, and I was more than willing to accept the charge, having come to love the child so dearly.

  5

  I do not love easily. Contrary to local belief, I am not in the least sweet-natured. I am highly critical, and easily displeased by circumstances which I unfortunately cannot control. It would accord better with my temperament, I often think, had I been born a fishwife, licensed to strong language and even physical belligerence; or else a tycoon with a retinue of understrappers, who when I said “come” or “go” came or went unquestioningly as helots. Being instead an elderly single woman of no position
and small means, I do the best I can for myself by appearing sweet.—When I say, “no position,” that is not entirely true: my late father was Vicar of the parish, and so long as I stay where I am I enjoy a certain status; but it is my reputation for sweetness that enables me to exert my will. If I say to Mrs. Brewer “come,” even though she has rheumatism she cometh; or if to the window-cleaner “go, I’m lying down,” off he goeth like a shot and comes back next day. Of course to preserve this fictitious character I need to do more than my share of disagreeables, such as watching by sickbeds till the doctor comes, at a pinch watching by corpses after he has left, breaking news of bereavements, and in general continuing to act as I’d acted all through my girlhood and then young-womanhood as an unpaid auxiliary curate. Early training stands me in good stead! I am nevertheless by nature far more fishwife or tycoon—who in the way of lack of inhibitions must have much in common—and have never doubted that at any real crisis I would react as ruthlessly as either, only so far there had been no occasion.

  6

  I made no attempt to explain this new development to Antoinette. She appeared, as I say, to have forgotten her parents completely: I should have had to begin by reminding her of them, which I felt quite beyond my powers. Antoinette lived in the present; in which she lived with me. To try and explain that she was not, immediately, going to live anywhere else seemed pure waste of time.

  One result of the war was of course that all we civilians were named and numbered, and issued with identity and ration cards, and generally ordered about in a way which I personally found extremely irritating, but upon which I shall not dwell. I hope I am quite sufficiently patriotic, but I saw no point, nor do I now, in the nuisance of putting up blackout curtains along a coastline so inevitably defined by the North Sea, of which the German Admiralty presumably had maps. However there was a general interferingness abroad; Doctor Alice, for example, visited me quite unsummoned to check that my bronchitis was no worse than usual.